ROWE-y: Doing Personal Stuff At The Office

The other day I learned an important lesson from my new colleague. The cool thing is that she just joined our team less than a month ago and she's 15 years younger than me.

Like most Gen-Xers, I was "raised" professionally by Baby Boomers who have a strong sense of values in terms of working hard, making sacrifices and strictly separating their work and personal lives. Except, of course, when they bring work home.

Lately, I've been realizing that I'm unconsciously trying to keep my personal life away from the office. For example

• I'm slightly annoyed when a friend calls me at work
• When I need to call the authorities or some service provider, I usually forget about it until their offices are closed anyway.
• And when I check my personal email at the office, although I don't get out of my way to hide it, I do it discreetly.

Now to the good part:
Our boss announced that she was going home. Trying to be funny, I said to our young Padawan:

Cool, now that she's leaving, lets watch some YouTube.

For a split second she looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world. Or at least that was my interpretation of her facial expression. So I asked her what she was thinking. She simply said:

I didn't understand why you couldn't watch YouTube before.

Of course, I could have answered that, duh, it was just a joke. But I kept my big mouth shut realizing that I had an opportunity to learn something.

Now that I'm writing this I realize that I already made some progress today:

• I saw an add for a nice apartment and called without second thoughts
• I checked my personal email several times today
• I had a long lunch
• I had some fun with colleagues in the afternoon
• I visited the PortableApps site (PDFTK and Toucan sound very promising and OpenOffice v3 is available)
  

Of course, I didn't count all of this as work time, so I know that I'm not cheating my employer. But today I didn't worry about people thinking that I might be slacking off. I was just having a good time.

Conclusion:
I learned a lot from my Baby Boomer colleagues and mentors. But for now, I'll listen to some Millenials.

And thus concludes my second attempt at trying to become more ROWE-y (or become ROWE-ier).
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HR Wench And Boobs

Did you read the title of this post? Really?

I'm having fun right now and it might not be healthy in a long-term kind of way. When Jenn reads this post, she will either hate me forever and a day or uncontrollably roll on the floor and - between spasms of giggles - shout "what an idiot, I'm laughing so hard every fiber in my body hurts when I even try to breathe. I will never ever again eat Swiss chocolate!"

Okay, now that I wrote this flamboyant introduction, it's actually not half as wild as you might have expected.

I went to my RSS reader, checked out Wenchie's new post about staying positive while looking for a job (it's a great post, you really should check it out), thought I might add some smart-ass comment so I opened a new tab to her blog page, read the existing comments, clicked on Kerry's link and read the boob post. It's a funny post. If you work in HR, you know that it might happen. And if you work in HR long enough, you know it will happen to you eventually.

Tip: google "career change now, and-I-mean-RIGHT-NOW!"

Oh phooey, I still need to post a smart-ass comment on Wenchie's blog...
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Link: In Defense Of HR Professionals

I'm certainly the first to admit that there are a lot of numskulls working in HR (like everywhere else). When asked about my career choice I often reply that I certainly wouldn't work in HR if I had a choice. And everybody who ever shared an office with me heard me groan that I should have learned an honest profession when I was young.

Fact is that I love working in HR. Last week a manager said that it was obvious that I felt comfortable working in HR. I think I'll buy this man a beer.

Here's what Bob Sutton wrote on his blog:

HR people often get more abuse than they deserve because they are so often put in a position where no one notices them when they do something right, but they get blamed out of proportion when things go wrong.

If you're an HR Pro, do yourself a favor and go read it.
If you think all HR departments all over the world are populated exclusively by idiots, go read it and have some pity ;-)
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ARSE Used Over 180'000 Times

The ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam), based on Bob Sutton's book "The No Asshole Rule" was used more than 180'000 times.

Don't be an ass, go do the ARSE now.
It only takes 5 minutes. If you did it before, find out if your score changed.

Today my score was 3 (0 to 5 points: "you don't sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself"). In March 2008 my score was 4. I had just quit a job that I loved very much but I badly needed a change. In December 2007 I scored 5 ("borderline certified asshole") and was looking for a new job.

Conclusion: The ARSE may not be scientifically valid, but it's certainly interesting.
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Geeky: Listening to music at work

"My boss told me the other day that I was spending in average 6.5 hours per day on YouTube according to the company's Internet statistics. But I'm only using YouTube to listen to background music while I work. Are they allowed to check what I'm doing online? What about privacy?

This is not an actual reader question. But I heard this story from a friend and decided to turn it into a fake reader question.

Secondly, I could start an analysis of the Swiss Data Protection Law, but I just don't feel like it at the moment. Me know, me am lazy ;-)

Thirdly, using YouTube extensibly at work doesn't make much sense to me. Whether your employer uses legal or illegal means to track your web traffic isn't the point. Anybody could walk by your desk five times a day and see that you're on YouTube.

Furthermore, streaming videos all day uses a lot of bandwidth and although many people still think that the Interwebs are for free, connecting to this cyber maze still costs a lot.

Besides, using YouTube to listen to music doesn't really make much sense to me. But that's just lil' ol' me...

So here's my geeky solution:

• buy a USB stick. The last one I bought had 16 GB and didn't cost that much anymore
• download CoolPlayer+ (a portable app) and copy it to the stick
• fill up the remaining space on your stick with your favorite mp3 songs

The beauty of portable apps is that you don't need to install the programs, you just copy them somewhere. Even if you don't have admin access to your work computer, you can use programs and it costs your company zilch in terms of bandwidth.

Alternatives:
Of course, you could just copy your mp3 files to the hard drive and use the pre-installed media player. But this wouldn't be geeky, now would it ;-)

@JT: Thank you, the Twitter message that you wrote 17 days ago and which I only saw today motivated me to write again! And your new site logo looks really cool!
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Quote: Competence (L.J. Peter)

Dr. Laurence J. Peter, creator of the Peter Principle, said:

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
(Peter L.J. & Hull R., The Peter Principle - Why things always go wrong, 1969)

This quote isn't helpful if you're looking for a definition of "competence". If you've been looking for your contact lenses, however, maybe they were in your eyes the whole time and you've just experienced a classic "duh" moment.

You may have some specific criteria for evaluating your own competence. This is good and necessary on a personal level and should validate your self-esteem. But if you want to boost your career, all that matters is whether your manager thinks you're competent or not.

So the next question is: what does your manager expect from you?
I can spontaneously think of two completely different criteria for competence. Your manager's main goal is that you:

• provide great customer service
• execute processes as efficiently as possible

Of course you're an engaged professional and want to offer your customers both. But unfortunately trying to get the best of both worlds often results in mediocre performance and disappointed managers.

Let me illustrate the two examples:

An employee pops into your office an has a question. You know that it will take you 15 minutes to make your customer happy.

Great customer service
You drop what you were doing and take care of the unplanned request. The employee will be very happy but you might have to go home later than planned or won't be able to deliver some things on time.

Efficient processes
Dropping what you were doing is not efficient, so you ask your customer to send you an email and promise to take care of the request within 72 hours. The employee seems a bit disappointed when he leaves your office and you lock the door behind him to avoid further distractions.

Depending on what is expected of you, both reactions can be appropriate. The art is to find out what your manager expects of you.

Since many managers have trouble formulating their expectations, here's a hint:

• If your company has 1 HR person per 50 employees, you should be able to provide customized services and satisfy spontaneous requests at once.
• If there's only 1 HR person per 300 employees, you're probably better off defining some Service Level Agreements (e.g. all requests must be sent to hr@YourCompany.com and will be processed within 72 hours).

...and did you find your contact lenses?
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We're All Gonna Die

No, I'm not depressed and I'm not borderline suicidal either.
Yes, I'm a big fan of Heroes. Although lots of people say that it's lost its edge, I still luh-huve it. Very much, very deeply and very fondly.

At the beginning of ep 3x10 (for the die-hard fans: at 9 min 4 secs) Brea Grant playing the character Daphne Millbrook says

We're all gonna die...

Yes, we're all gonna die. Someday. Eventually.

I can only speak for myself, but tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of my life.

So what is today? The day before the first day of the rest of my life? How long will my life be? Who knows, who cares? I once heard that TODAY matters. What about tomorrow? Too complicated? Too ethereal? And what does it have to do with HR? And what does "ethereal" mean?

[switch to HR topic]
Too touchy-feely pink-and-fluffy?

[now we're back to HR]
Yeah, HR is all about emotions and being nice to each other.

Oh wait, aren't HR peeps known to be tough as nails, emotionless and slaves to the corporate line? Yes, no, maybe, a little, a lot, very much, not at all?

In case you've been wondering: no, this post has no purpose.

I've been enjoying some time off the Interwebs. One year ago I would have felt miserable being away from the Net for more than 5 hours. At the moment I haven't been posting for quite a while, I check my emails once a week (usually) and have been ignoring Twitter completely (hey, is it true that Twitter rejected a multi-billion offer from Facebook?).

Tim Ferriss would probably call this a "mini-retirement" from the Web.

I'm too young to be a retiree, but it's never too early to retire.

Okay, I'm not sure if the last statement sounded cool, insightful, lame or whatever. Maybe some Net-addict will add it to some online quotes database?

Buddy, are you still checking my blog from time to time hoping that I will post something? If so, puh-leaze leave a comment ;-)

And now for the punchline:
I enjoyed my time being (more or less) offline. I miss being (actively) online. I love writing. Lately, I didn't have anything to write about. But the Bamby movie told me one thing: If you have nothing nice to say, shut the fuck up. Or in my case: if you have nothing interesting to write about, just read books, try out Ramsay's Broccoli soup (it's delicious!), watch Heroes and have a good time.

And that's the Word for today.